'Accounting disability rate difficult'

Census Commissioner of India C Chandramouli has admitted that accurate data on disability is difficult to collect. Chandramouli on Thursday explained the measures taken to count accurately the number of disabled people in the country. The data would be released soon, he said.

Chandramouli was addressing a seminar on the eve of the release of a report titled “Children with Disabilities.” The report is a part of the “State of the world’s children,” prepared by the Unicef.

 “People do not want to report about disables in their families. We had given training to the enumerators and made other efforts to count them authentically for the 2011 census,” he said. “We have also tried to put true figures for different categories of people.”

He said it was a difficult task since the people were themselves not aware of the type of illness their kin were suffering from. They found it difficult to distinguish between “mental retard and mental illness,” he said.

 Raising the question of proper data, Unicef representative Louis George Arsenault said the Indian census of 2001 put the percentage of disables at 2.13 per cent of the population. According to the world disability report of 2011, it is about 25 per cent.
He said reporting low figures results in low allocations.